


Antenuptial

by Araine



Category: Spiritwalker Trilogy - Kate Elliott
Genre: Other, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 18:28:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600814
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Araine/pseuds/Araine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pre-Canon. Cat and Andevai talk about marriage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Antenuptial

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Griddlebone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Griddlebone/gifts).



> Pre-canon fic. Sorry I couldn't manage to get Rory in there. All of the sewing is based on about twenty minutes of research and my own knowledge of (modern) sewing, so apologies for historical inaccuracy. (Does that even count when it's an alternate universe?)

“Cat, can you pin this for me?”

“Just one moment!”

Catherine Hassi-Barahal bit her lip, squinted in the shivering lamplight, and pushed the thread through the head of the needle. Perfect. She’d gotten it. She looped the thread around her finger and tied it off deftly. 

“Cat, please! Or I’ll drop it and I’ll never fit this bodice exactly this way again!”

Cat plunked her needle into a handy pincushion and stood to answer her cousin Beatrice’s call. Her cousin faced the slightly-tarnished silver mirror and pinched two places in the bodice of the dress she was trying on. 

“Where’s your pin box?” Cat asked Bee.

“On the stool—does this fit as well as I think it does?”

Cat appraised her cousin thoughtfully. Beatrice was plump and curvaceous, with imperious eyes set under dark brows and a mess of shiny black curls that tumbled down her back. The dark burgundy of the brocade they had found at the market suited her/ She was one of the prettiest girls Cat knew, and if she had not loved her cousin so very much, she might have hated her for it.

She swooped up two sharpened bone pins from the pin box and deftly secured them into the fabric, to hold its shape while Beatrice made modifications. “I think,” Cat said. “You’ll only have, hmm, half the boys in the Academy in love with you?”

Bee stuck out her tongue. “So you think it looks good then?”

“It’s fine,” Cat said, laughing.

“Would you help me take it off?” Bee began drawing the dress over her head, careful of the sharpened pin that Cat had put in. Cat helped, conscious of the heap of excess fabric that would eventually become the fantail skirt. 

Since they were twelve, Catherine and Beatrice had always sewn their own clothes. Thrift, Aunt Tilly said. They bought bolts of fabric and kept boxes of the unused scraps and bought castoff patterns from the modiste. 

“Do you think Maester Amadou would like it?” Beatrice asked, raising her arms for Cat to pull the dress over her head.

“If he saw it,” Cat said. She held the dress while Bee stepped out of the voluminous skirts and—now clad only in her chemise and bloomers—dashed for her much simpler winter wool skirts and jacket, folded neatly on a chair. The first chill had come over Adurnam. “It’s more a dinner dress, isn’t it? Or would you wear that low-cut a bodice to the lecture hall?”

Bee gathered up her clothing with a huff and a toss of her hair, playing at offense. Cat laughed and returned to her own sewing project. 

“If he did see it, though, do you think he’d like it?”

“Who?”

“Maester Amadou, as if you did not know!”

“I think he’d like it very much,” Cat said, starting in on the embroidery at the cuff of the forest-green jacket she had just sewn. She’d drawn out a pattern of flowering vines in chalk just earlier. “And you’ll leave him broken-hearted just like the rest.”

“Oh, faugh, Cat,” Bee said. “Besides, I just learned yesterday, Maester Lewis is engaged to be married.”

Cat arched an eyebrow.

“I wasn’t snooping!—I only overheard someone saying, his family has made a contract.”

“Did they say who with?”

“No. Probably someone who doesn’t sew her own dresses, though.”

Cat set down her embroidery. “Bee…”

“It’s true,” Bee said, mulish. “You think I don’t see it as clear as everyone? That even if I flirt with Maester Amadou, or Maester Lewis or any of the academy boys, they won’t even look my way because we’re poor? It’s no use hiding from that fact, no matter how much nice brocade we can get secondhand.”

“Don’t let Aunt Tilly catch you saying that.” Cat’s fingers trembled slightly, and she had to stop embroidering or risk ruining the work. 

“Maybe I should stop making this dress,” Bee said, “go about in rags. Make everyone face the fact of our circumstances.”

Cat rolled her eyes. Bee was being extravagant again. To prove it, Bee giggled. “That would be silly, wouldn’t it?” she said.

“The height of foolishness,” Cat replied.

“I don’t suppose there’s a chance you want to do my hem for me? Yours is always straighter.”

“Only because you haven’t the patience for sewing a hem.”

They worked in companionable silence for some time—Beatrice finishing with the darts in the bodice and moving on to the fantail gather at the back of the skirt, Cat embroidering three inches along the cuff—before Bee spoke again.

“Do you ever think about it?”

Cat pricked her finger, and had to put it in her mouth before she bled on her fabric. “About what?” she asked around the finger in her mouth.

“That’s vulgar,” Bee said. “About marriage, I mean. What it will be like. Who we’ll marry.”

“I suspect the Aunt Tilly and Uncle Jonatan will pick someone suitable,” Cat said. “Or the mother-house.”

“Well you certainly have a sense of romance,” Bee said.

“I have a sense of practicality,” Cat countered.

Bee ignored the jab with a tilt of her chin that said she was beneath such things. “We’ll both be twenty soon, though,” Bee said. “We’re free to make our own matches then—it’s Kena’ani law. Don’t you think about it, at least a little bit?”

“No,” Cat said, and that was mostly true, or at least as much as she would admit to. 

\--

Coming in on the carriage, the village of Haranwy always seemed small and drab. Wood and wattle and daub—made all of brown and haphazard patchwork. When he was inside the walls he could see everything else: the craftsmanship of the buildings, the sturdiness of the walls, the well-kept pathways and carefully tended talismans.

On the carriage road, sitting on plush seats, surrounded by mahogany inlaid with pearl, wearing a gold-and-black dash jacket, it looked like what the mansa and the others always said it was. 

Andevai scowled and looked away from the window. 

Instead, he stared at his fretting hands. The threads of cold magic were there, ready for him to pluck and pull at them, as they had been since he was sixteen. They were stronger now with the frost on the ground, but he had never been bereft of them. He left them alone. 

The mansa had given him his two missions only yesterday morning, and had given him the day to prepare and pack. Even so, he wasn’t sure how he was going to pull it off. The airship that they kept in Adurnam was an affront to the Mage Houses, and must be destroyed—but even with the potency of his own cold magic it seemed a daunting task to complete alone.

That only meant that if he were able to pull it off, the other House mages would only respect him more. He had all of the money he could ever need, but knowledge and respect were the currency of Four Moons House, and Andevai had started off at a grave disadvantage. He needed all he could cultivate.

There was something else in Adurnam aside from the airship, but that part of the task seemed easy compared to the insurmountable problem that was the mechanical wonder of Expedition. 

The carriage slowed to a halt at the edge of the village—bound to the Mage House though it was, the coach and coachman and guard were still of the Spirit World and there were wards at the edge of Haranwy Village—and Andevai jumped out in one fluid motion. 

His boots crunched over frost-lined grass. He was glad the crops were in, otherwise they would likely be lost to cold; instead, the village of Haranwy had enough to sustain both them and their tithes to Four Moons House through the coming winter.

He walked through the gate. A black haired young woman near-tackled him, and Andevai fell back against the coach with an exhalation of air. He crushed the girl to his chest all the same.

“It’s good to see you as well, Kayleigh,” Andevai said, foregoing the traditional greeting, as it was permissible to do with family. She released her embrace, and he his, though he did keep one arm around her slender shoulders as they walked into the village. Kayleigh grinned up at him.

“I saw the coach from the road and knew it was you,” she explained. “I didn’t know you’d permission to visit again so soon.”

“I’m afraid I don’t have much time to visit,” Andevai said. “The mansa has sent me out on a mission. I’ll be gone for a week, maybe two.” Kayleigh looked down the road, at the parked coach. “Don’t look like that,” Andevai chided. “This is needful.”

“Where are you going?” Kayleigh said. “What are you doing? Or can you not tell me again?”

Four Moon’s House’s involvement in the matter of the airship was to remain secret, but at least this time he had news he could tell his sister. 

“The mansa has finally chosen a bride for me, or so it seems,” Andevai said, with great attempt to make his voice as disaffected as it was possible to do. 

“You cannot be serious!”

“I’m afraid I am,” Andevai said. “I’ve been told to go and… retrieve her. It’s not exactly a surprise.” The only surprise about all of this was that it had taken so long. The mansa meant to make use of Andevai, he had known that for years, and marriage was a tool just the same as cold magic was. He had never been free to marry as he pleased, and even if he were, he shouldn’t like to bring the type of woman he was likely to fall in love with into the House with him. 

“Do you know anything about her? Is she from another Mage House?”

“No,” Andevai said. “She’s a Phoenician, from Adurnam—her family name is Hassi-Barahal. That’s all I know.”

He knew scant other things: that her family was bound under ancient contract with Four Moons House to offer up their eldest daughter in exchange for the blackmail carefully stowed in the seat of the carriage, for example.

He had thought to ask what the mansa wanted with a Phoenician girl from Adurnam, when he’d been told to go and retrieve the eldest girl from the household, but he had not in fact asked. He knew only that the mansa thought her greatly important, and was not willing to let her slip away; that he had counseled Andevai that the girl’s family might try to spirit her away if they knew he was coming for her.

“You’ll bring her, right?” Kayleigh asked. “I’ll get to meet her?”

Andevai nodded a promise. 

He wondered what she would think of his home village, of his family. Would she think them rustic, far beneath her city-born notice? What would she think of her husband, born in a hovel? Sure the other magisters and their ilk would not let her forget it—would she be ashamed whenever she looked at him, stood at his side? 

He imagined a proud young woman to whom he could not put a face, irrevocably bound to him year after year, slowly coming to hate him because of the shame of his birth. 

Perhaps it would not happen. Perhaps she would not care, although he could not imagine any other way she might feel. 

They were nearly to his grandmother’s house, walking swiftly in the early morning chill. Andevai put the thought out of his mind, let Kayleigh lead him up to the small house with the finely fitted boards that expertly kept out the chill and the carved roof beams, to tell his grandmother the good news.


End file.
